intersting but to be honest, not surprizing. I agree that the power of the twitter-account has a depp impact weather the link is effective for the ranking or not. The number of follower is important, perhaps also the pageRank.

What I observed is a change in the blog-ranking. I think the influence of tweets is in the "blog-ranking-algo" much higher. But since some days the factor "retweets" seems to be less important.

I haven't any experience for news, but I think it works comparable.

The main point is: social media links have an impact - and Google is actually trying to find a good way to modify this factor.

I think, there is one more important think when talking about (youTube) video SEO : use the first 36 hours!

There are a lot of daily ranking lists on youTube (best ratings, most comments, most views) for every category. If you reach these lists your video have good chances to be a burner. If not it is much harder to optimize.

So, make a roadmap before uploading how to involve social media within the first 36 hours.

As you said the toolbar-PR could be old, depending on last PR-Update. So what I miss : how old is the toolbar-PR you have tested. The correlation should be much higher a few days after an update then some week later.

In the "Google model in my head" the pagerank ist not directly correlated with the serps. But there is a very clear correlation between the pageRank and link-power. That means : a site that is linked by high pr-sites has a better chance to rank well. Often after a while this effekt comes out in the visible pagerank - but it took some months.

So - to have pagerank is not important for the sites ranking but for all linked sites.

thanks for this. What I really like is to focus on good content. Because good content itself is a kind of optimization : it generetes links and traffic automatically.

But, as Rand said: this is not seo. In my eyes its a kind of definition for seo : to use all these methods to rank a content, that could not live on itself ( that means nobody will see it ).

I had some old sites where i never had done anything (without writing and showing art ). The pages ranked well. But when I began to optimize - quit simple - the pages ranked much better. So i would say : good content for users is the "i" and seo is the point on the "i".

Hey guys, thanks for this discussion. Its one of the best I have ever read :-)

Engines (t.m. the algo) are build by humans. They try to find the "most human faktors" or something like this. Optimizing for engines means to optimize for those engeneers ideas ("what is the best result for all people"). Sometimes this is in conflict with special target-groups. And for this we can use the "non-user-optimization" methods.